UNHCR: Ramadan Fundraising Media Drop
Agency: We Are Friday
Role: Lead Video Editing & Motion Graphics
The Ambition & The Reality: The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees needed to drive immediate donor action during the critical Ramadan fundraising window. The creative ambition was to bridge Western and Middle Eastern demographics through universal stories of resilience. We were tasked with building four original films and updating a small batch of legacy videos. The reality involved standardising a diverse array of assets while ensuring the heavy emotional weight of the subject matter survived the rigid, fast-paced constraints of vertical social media.
The Craft & The Workflow: To protect the human element, we had to ensure the technical formatting never distracted the viewer. Translating dense humanitarian messaging into 9:16 mobile formats required a specific structural approach. Instead of forcing audiences to read long sentences, we engineered a vertical centre cycle. We locked the header text and rapidly cycled standard humanitarian iconography on solid yellow circular stickers in the exact centre of the screen. This bypassed platform safe zones and kept the viewer's focus locked on the visual narrative. We paired this high-visibility Process Yellow with black text to mimic emergency visual language, hitting strict WCAG contrast ratios to drive optimal conversion.
Beyond the graphic formatting, the true challenge was securing the correct emotional output. We focused heavily on cultural sensitivity to align with different donor expectations. By protecting the dignity of the subjects on screen and pacing the edits to allow intimate human moments to breathe, we built narratives that connected universally. We framed the campaign around community and hope. Allowing the raw reality of the footage to carry the emotional weight meant we could avoid heavy-handed editing techniques and let the individual human stories speak for themselves.
The Outcome: The final delivery united a broad set of assets into a highly polished social campaign. By combining sensitive narrative psychology with strict motion design logic, we provided the agency with a suite of videos mathematically optimised for mobile conversion and deeply rooted in human empathy.
Deliverables:
Full post-production on four original campaign films
Brand standardisation (top and tail) for legacy assets
Social media formatting (1:1 and 9:16 ratios)
Culturally sensitive editorial pacing
WCAG-compliant motion graphics package